Asteroid capture program needs your help to prove we’re ‘smarter than the dinosaurs’

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Amateur astronomers constantly amaze me. They work tirelessly, meticulously, with equipment that costs a fraction of the professional stuff, and with increasing regularity they find objects or discover principles that have eluded even the best-funded professional observatories. This is partly because astronomy, with its neurotic lens maintenance and hundredth-of-a-degree accuracy ranges naturally lends itself to a certain personality type. However, it’s also because space is simply very big. It’s a 360-by-360 panorama, compounded by the demands of focusing technology, which means that depth is also an issue. To search a space that is functionally infinite in volume, we need more than just expertise — we need manpower.

The US government is planning a series of “Grand Challenges” to the public and the research sector of science, the latest of which involves keeping vigilant watch over our skies. The human race has only been capable of such observations for a tiny fraction of the time that such a threat has existed, but still, if we were to be wiped out by an asteroid while Hubble just happened to be looking the other way? Talk about having cosmic egg on your face. NASA wants to enlist everyone, from start-up observatories to rooftop telescopes, in the quest to keep our planet secure — now there’s a security scare that nerds can get behind.

This is a map of the density of communications satellites around Earth. As you can see, there are serious dangers to even a minor collision.

It’s not all in the name of protecting the children, however. As you might imagine, NASA has more than a few ways to make use of the sort of comprehensive database that such a large-scale effort could compile. While the traditional idea has been that a potentially apocalyptic asteroid could be directed wide via simple explosive force (in this, and only this, the movie Armageddon got it right), NASA does have a secondary plan. It’s finicky, and it requires just the right kind of asteroid, but with the public’s help it could turn the next great extinction-rock into our next great science experiment.

The asteroid rendezvous mission may be stillborn thanks to recent congressional bill redirecting funding to more Earthly concerns, but NASA still wants you to help them find a candidate. It must be the right size (small), be moving at the right speed (slow), and be on the right schedule (pass nearby sometime in the 2020’s). If all these conditions are met, and met well, NASA has a preliminary plan in place to actually put a crew of astronauts on its surface. Okay, maybe Armageddon got a couple of things right. The crew would fit the asteroid with boosters, or some as yet uninvented technology, to direct it into a low lunar orbit. Once there, we could study it at our leisure. A captive asteroid could tell us everything from the composition of the places it’s been to the abundance of potentially life-forming molecules.

Jumping back to a pure security perspective, this is about more than just protecting the Earth from extinction missiles like the one that felled the dinosaurs; such asteroids are incredibly rare, and our atmosphere protects us from the vast majority of the rest — but what about our extra-atmospheric devices? There is an idea called the Kessler syndrome that postulates a rather terrifying scenario in which a single satellite collision in a sufficiently crowded area of space could lead to a cascade of ejected debris that wipes out a good portion of our orbiting devices. We have all sorts of computer algorithms in place to make sure no such collision occurs between satellites — but what about an unseen asteroid?

When it comes to unlikely yet terrifying security threats, nerds tend to be on the skeptical side. However, when it comes to the threat of an asteroid or comet, they get up in arms. This call to action gives them a chance to put their money where their mouth is. Pick up a telescope. Look to the sky. Be a part of the solution.

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JD Rahman

Yes, we will happily help to ensure the safety of your precious spy satellites.

Mr Moo

Why dont they start by putting robots (or satellites) onto asteroids and monitoring them, they would be able to find out everything they need about the asteroid and they will be able to look at all the things the asteroid encounters on its travels through space. If they could land on a fast moving asteroid, they might even be able to get to another star system at a relatively cheap price

Jesse Custer

Another star system… maybe in a few hundred thousand years…

chris

vacuum permeability or magnetic constant is a good start.Cheers

Jesse Custer

If their best proposed design is quite literally a giant bucket to capture an asteroid. Then I say great, what a waste of money that would have been.

Besides, the best asteroid mining proposals coming from the U.S. have been from private groups. Not Nasa.

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